Friday, 06 July 2007
I've never shouted "Bullshit!" at the screen before. Welcome to Die Farce..
As a movie, Die Hard 4.0 is an average action thriller. Which is to say that it is like almost every other action movie ... except Bruce Willis plays a character called John McClane.
Imagine a feature length episode of The A-Team . Imagine YET ANOTHER razor-thin plot about an operative turned rogue (again? Sheesh, the FBI and CIA really must sort out their vetting procedures). Imagine a Die Hard Movie with no swearing. That's right. No "Yippie Ki-Ay Motherfucker!". An absolute dearth of blood and gore. Bad guys that are seemingly indestructible. Where everyone can jump from exploding helicopters and walk away. Where John McClane can jump onto a jet and punch a plane to death. Moments where logic and common sense are jettisoned in favour of yet another KER-POW explosion. Where bad guys aim is worse than stormtroopers. They couldn't hit a football pitch with a nuke even if they were standing on it.
This isn't to say that Die Hard 4.0 isn't enjoyable. It's a fun rollercoaster ride of good setpieces and has some good moments. But it isn't a Die Hard movie. The familiar, world weary air, the wisecracking, very human John McClane is replaced by a sanitized PG-13 Uberhuman Brucinator. Combine this with an infuriating personality void geek of a McGuffin, a set of impossible conincidences, and the standard end-of-civilisation plot, and it... doesn't make sense. It raises more questions than it answers.
Where do they go to get these henchmen? Bad Guys'R'Us? Why blow people up with a virus when they have crack squad teams of assasins on site? Whats the bad guys motive? To prove a point? At what point did he decide not to be a boring geek and become an evil greedomanic? When did Bruce become Homer Simpson? - There's a scene in a car where you almost expect his skin to turn yellow and ask "YOU DON'T LIKE GRAND FUNK?"
And if you are going to steal from other action films "Under Siege 2" and "True Lies" are not good reference points. And cutting the movie to shreds so it can get a "PG" in the States is simply an insult to the millions of people who paid money to see the other films.
"Die Hard 4.0" is... an average action movie trapped inside a bunch of sanitised video game type exploits. It also shows how far movies have fallen in the past decade. It's awash with typical tricks of modern film making : jump zooms, jump cuts, and is sometimes barely comprehensible superfast camera moves. The bad guys are charmless ciphers, Willis an indestructible cleanmouth, and overall it's a missed, open goal. All this film represents is a sizable opening weekend to the board at the Nakatomi Building of 20th Century Fox. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not very good either. Die Farce, more like. Only registered users can write comments.
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